Reconstruction of the United States facts for kids
The ruins of Richmond, Virginia after the American Civil War, newly freed African Americans voting for the first time in 1867, Office of the Freedmen's Bureau in Memphis, Tennessee, Memphis Riots of 1866
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Date | January 1, 1863 (14 years, 2 months and 30 days) |
to March 31, 1877
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Location | United States, Southern United States |
Also known as | Reconstruction; Radical Reconstruction |
The Reconstruction was after the American Civil War. It was the remaking of the Southern United States, after it had lost its war of rebellion and slavery was ended. The southern states were occupied territory. Andrew Johnson became President of the U.S. after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. He wanted to make it easy to restore local rule in the previously rebellious states, and he permitted some of them to hold elections in 1865. Former leaders of the Confederate States of America who ran as Democrats were elected to Congress, and states passed laws that denied rights to former slaves.
Many members of the Republican Party wanted stricter terms before local rule was returned to the South. After the Republicans won a large majority of the Congressional seats in the 1866 elections, they refused to let former Confederate leaders take seats in the Congress. The Republicans then passed laws that former leaders of the rebellion were not allowed to hold office and were not allowed to vote. Three new amendments to the U.S. Constitution were passed that ended slavery, made former slaves citizens, and gave them the right to vote. Some newly freed black slaves won elected offices.
Many white people resisted having former slaves having equal rights and being able to vote. The Ku Klux Klan was formed to force black people out of political and economic power. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, white people in the South used their regained political powers to pass Jim Crow Laws. These laws enforced segregation (keeping blacks and whites separate) and took the vote away from African Americans whose parents or grandparents were slaves. After Reconstruction, white Southerners voted mostly against the Republican Party for about 80 years.
Images for kids
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A political cartoon of Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln, 1865, entitled "The Rail Splitter At Work Repairing the Union". The caption reads (Johnson): "Take it quietly Uncle Abe and I will draw it closer than ever." (Lincoln): "A few more stitches Andy and the good old Union will be mended."
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Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States (1861–1865)
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Andrew Johnson, 17th President of the United States (1865–1869)
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The debate over Reconstruction and the Freedmen's Bureau was nationwide. This 1866 Pennsylvania election poster alleged that the bureau kept the Negro in idleness at the expense of the hardworking white taxpayer. A racist caricature of an African American is depicted.
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"This is a white man's government", Thomas Nast's caricature of the forces arraigned against Grant and Reconstruction in the 1868 election. Atop a black Union veteran reaching for a ballot box: the New York City Irish; Confederate and Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest; and big-money Democratic Party chairman August Belmont, a burning freedmen's school in the background. Harper's Weekly, September 5, 1868.
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Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States (1869–1877)
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Atlanta's rail yard and roundhouse in ruins shortly after the end of the Civil War
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Winslow Homer's 1876 painting A Visit from the Old Mistress
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A Republican Form of Government and No Domestic Violence, by Thomas Nast, a political cartoon about the Wheeler Compromise in Louisiana, published in Harper's Weekly, March 6, 1875
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Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President of the United States (1877–1881)
See also
In Spanish: Reconstrucción (Estados Unidos) para niños